When I click on the server I get "Error # - 321: unable to attach.

Articles and Tips: qna

01 Nov 1998

Dear Ab-end: I have installed the NDS for NT v2 Beta 3, including the Admin utilities on the NT Server and the snap-ins. I can see the server and replicas in the NT NDSMGR, but when I click on the server I get "Error # - 321: unable to attach. An attempt to connect to a server failed." When I try to create a partition with either the NT version of the tool or the usual, I get the message "One or more servers in the replica list is down." Any ideas what I'm doing wrong?

—Confused in Colorado

Dear Confused: The NT Tools have a few pre-requisites:

The snap-in must be installed in the SNAPINS directory under the directory where you are running NWAdmn32.
Under the SNAPINS directory, there must be an NTTOOLS directory which contains the NTTOOLS.INI file. If this file is missing or corrupt, the page will appear without any icons. The supplied install, NTTOOLS.EXE, isn't very smart, and relies on the user to select the directory where the snap-in should be installed. (This should be fixed in a future release.)
The user running the NWAdmin utility must have authorized access to the primary domain controller's server's SYSTEM\SYSTEM32 directory (also known as the ADMIN$ share directory) that the NDS Domain Object references. This is where the actual tools are located.

When you select the NTTools details page, it checks for a connection to the PDC server. If a connection cannot be made or the user declines to supply credentials, the tools will be greyed out. If the Admin$ share has been removed, NTTools can't work. If the paths to the executables in the NTTOOLS.INI file have been changed from UNC-style paths to drive letter paths, NTTOOLS will ignore them. It is designed to be as flexible as possible and use Share names (such as ADMIN$) rather than hard-coded paths (such as C:\WINNT\SYSTEM32).

* Originally published in Novell AppNotes

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